• Not only. It is also, for example, a context for parental rights and obligations and a community acquiring property.

If dissolution of marriage is a breach of this contract, then the appropriate remedy is not punitive damages (which I consider alimony to be)

• You can't just "consider," which in the context means "assert," this: you have to show it, which is difficult. The stated purpose of punitive damages is the punishment of wrongdoing: the stated purpose of alimony is the redistribution of property.

but simple settlement. To require one party to continue performance via financial support and not require the other to continue performance via whatever non-monetary means is askew. Alimony gathers support from a proposition that it is unjust to leave one spouse without means to support themselves. This is patronizing to say the least. Marriage as a contract means different things for those that enter, but the idea that a party contracts take care of the other spouse outside the terms of the contract is wrong. If one party does not work during the course of the marriage, there is a high degree of risk involved. However, there is a larger risk in choosing to contract to marriage at all. Alimony does not take away from the opportunity lost through choosing marriage, it just imposes unequal performance on parties post bad decisions.

• This is a cartoon of Rawls that doesn't have anything to do with the actual argument he made, and you would be better off dropping it than trying to explain Rawls' actual relevance to your argument, if any.

Alimony keeps the relationship between the parties ongoing in a way that is inconsistent with divorce. In a veil of ignorance situation, the same principles that might have individuals choose a democratic form of government would lead to an settlement only approach to marriage. It recognizes the autonomy of persons and with equality of opportunity seeks a path to justice that is tenable.

• Michael, you're not trying very hard here. You're making a speech, but you're not engaging any real arguments. Let's take two:
  1. Children are often found in families. What is the relevance of this "settlement only" incantation to child support? Are you actually arguing that when someone wants to get out of a marriage, he or she has no obligation to support children left behind? If there's a continuing claim on income to support children, your theoretical distinctions between "during the marriage" and "after the marriage" are nonsense. Moreover, money is fungible, so whether you call the redistribution of income "alimony" or "child support" is a distinction without a difference.
  2. In dissolution of childless marriages, the most common reason for redistribution of future income is that the marriage has invested heavily in the earning power of one partner. It occasionally happens, for example, that a wife puts a husband through law school, working to provide a household income and sometimes paying the husband's tuition. Suppose the husband then departs shortly after graduation. Do you claim that it is unfair for the wife to have a share of the future professional income to which her efforts also contributed within the context of the marriage? If the husband waits to depart until he has accumulated substantial property through the use of his education, she will be entitled to half. Surely by getting out earlier he is not entitled by his own conduct to extinguish all her claims on that property despite the fact that her investment is just as fully made? She cannot be more easily dischargeable as a wife than she would be as a creditor, can she?

• As you note, moreover, this is a default rule, subject to complete defeasance with nothing more than a pair of signatures. Why should the law presume that parties have given away important legal rights with respect to their own property unless they have been shown to waive with knowledge, on adequate information and without compulsion? Even if the State were merely neutral with respect to marriage, rather than favoring it extensively as it does in so many ways, why should it permit automatic waiver of significant property rights by mere implication in the act of getting married?

• I don't understand the origin of your antagonism to the rule here: if you have evidence that some crisis of unjust redistribution is at hand, you should have adduced it. Your arguments from fundamental morality are unconvincing for the two reasons I have given above and several more you can adduce for yourself; improving the paper along those lines means meeting the objections. Another route to a better argument might be to show what the problem is in some realist sense, by presenting some information about the world that would justify an approach less general than the one you advance in this draft.